MSE at UTA. The Department of Materials Science and Engineering is a university-wide, highly-interdisciplinary graduate program with 8 core materials faculty and approximately 25 affiliated faculty spanning from physics and chemistry to electrical, mechanical, aerospace, civil and biomedical engineering.

Bruno Azeredo, PhD

Abstract

Nanostructured silicon is (a) the highest-capacity anode for lithium-ion batteries, (b) a superb IR material for silicon photonics, bio-imagining systems and high-emissivity surfaces, (c) a compatible material for bioelectronics and, finally, (d) the most promising earth-abundant candidate for thermoelectric energy harvesters. However, bringing these applications into commercial development is limited by key manufacturing challenges that prevent scalable and low-cost processing of nanostructured silicon such as high defect density, low-dimensionality in geometrical control and low-throughput. Thus, my research focuses scaling up production of nanostructured silicon from micrograms to kilograms in an economical and sustainable fashion. In this talk, I will discuss methods that rely solely on the catalysis of electrochemical reactions to selectively etch silicon into 1D and 3D materials such as silicon nanowires and micro-lens. Our group has developed a novel imprinting platform to directly pattern Porous Silicon and single-crystal Silicon that makes progress towards addressing these challenges. This platform offers new capabilities such as sub-20 nm resolution, centimeter-scale parallelization and 3D geometrical control. Further, it operates at room temperature and utilizes earth-abundant and low cost chemicals, all of which lower the processing costs and may potentially enable large scale production of silicon nanomaterials.

Bio

Bruno Azeredo, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in Manufacturing Engineering at Arizona State University’s (ASU) Polytechnic School and member of the ASU Manufacturing Research and Innovation Hub. Dr. Azeredo earned his B.S. in engineering mechanics in 2010, M.S. in theoretical and applied mechanics in 2013, and Ph.D. in mechanical engineering in 2016, all from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research focuses on the design of manufacturing platforms to enable scalable production of micro and nanomaterials for applications in biomedical devices, optics, microelectronics and energy harvesting.